This wishlist item is about crowdsourcing.
There is a lot of amazing freeware work going on, but it only sees a limited audience: Those who find it and download it.
What if builders could submit their own work for consideration into the main build of Flight Simulator? We all know what our hometowns look like, and a feature like this could drastically improve the realism of the sim in a very short time. Same goes for aircraft.
The devil is in the details on this one, and there are a lot of details. I’ve put many of the considerations in a collapsible box, below. You might think with the inclusion of so many considerations that I’m shooting down my own idea, but the way I see it, Asobo/Microsoft would have to deal with these whether we think about them or not, so why not put them out in the open for discussion?
I’m sure there is plenty more to think about than what I’ve come up with, but here goes:
Click to expand details
- Review/quality standards: I can’t speak for MS/Adobo, but if I were them, I would want to review everything before including it in the game. If I were a builder, I would also want a published set of guidelines on what review criteria would be applied, so I know what to shoot for.
- Limited automatic review: For some limited scenery: It might be possible to review it automatically, e.g. if scenery falls within some published tolerance of the photogrammetry, maybe it could be automatically reviewed. Any rejections could be appealed to a manual reviewer for potential override.
- Submission of photos could be required to help the reviewer decide if this is something they want to include.
- ** Submission of POH/AFM could be required for testing aircraft. Adobo/Microsoft may need to hire one or more CFIs/check airmen to certify aircraft for inclusion.
- Performance: Scenery and airport submissions may have to meet certain perormance criteria so that flying past scenery doesn’t kill your frame rate.
- Seasonal or nighttime variations: Perhaps some submissions might simply be modifications of existing scenery/airports for night or seasonal variation. It stands to reason that not everything might be net new building from scratch.
- Maintenance: If you submit a building, and two years later, that building is demolished, how does it get out of the sim? I don’t know if Asobo/Microsoft have a process in place for the maintenance of structures they’ve already built by hand. Is there a review process every x number of years? Could the review of certain scenery be crowd sourced to people who opt in? Would it be automatically pulled out if fresh photogrammetry were to reveal something completely different?
- Intellectual property and compensation: I assume that anything that goes into the sim would have to become the intellectual property of Adobo/Microsoft with no compensation (again, I assume). You may be able to edit your own contribution once it’s in the sim, but it would probably have to go through the same review process again. And there might not be anything from stopping someone from taking your work and editing it further.
- Credit: Maybe credit could be given somewhere, in a “special thanks” page or something.
Regarding the details I posted, above, those are my ideas for how I think things could be handled. I don’t claim to know the best answer. Those details are mostly a starting point for discussion.
Also, I know someone out there is going to come out and say this is the stupidest idea in the world. If you disagree, just be civil about it.